Who is a black American? Barack Obama, the child of a Kenyan economist and an economic anthropologist, who was raised primarily by his white maternal grandmother? Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah, London-born political and moral philosopher and cultural theorist, who grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, and whose parents were a British children’s book author from a family that traced its ancestry to William the Conqueror, and a lawyer, diplomat and politician from the Ashanti region of Ghana?
What about Claude McKay, the Harlem Renaissance poet and novelist of Jamaican origin, or John Brown Russwurm, who co-founded the first black newspaper in the United States and was also born in Jamaica, or Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael), of who was 11 years old when he arrived in the United States from Trinidad and Tobago, or Shirley Chisholm, who spent much of her childhood in Barbados?
Today, over 10 percent of African Americans were born outside the United States, and over a fifth (21 percent) are immigrants or children of immigrants.
How we view the past is always colored by our present-day vantage point, but long before the recent surge in black migration from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, African American history and culture had an international dimension.
Even at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20thth For centuries, pioneering black historians emphasized that black Americans were part of a much broader African diaspora and that the history of race and labor systems could not be understood in geographic isolation.
Black historians, past and present, as diverse in ideology as Benjamin Brawley, WEB DuBois, John Hope Franklin, Michael A. Gomez, Gerald Horne, Robin DG Kelley, Rayford Logan, Nell Painter, Benjamin Quarrels, Isabel Wilkerson, Chancellor Williams, George Washington Williams, and Carter G. Woodson insisted that the history of black Americans, and indeed of the United States, must be seen in global, comparative, and diasporic terms.
As UCLA historian Kelley put it in 1999, black scholars, from the late 19th century onwards, provided a “new international framework for understanding the history of the United States and the history of the West in general, but much to the impoverishment of American history – their work had been dismissed or overlooked by the mainstream historical profession”.
Many pioneer black historians were highly critical of American nation-building, which depended on the displacement and dispossession of Native Americans, the exploitation of Africans and their descendants, and the conquest of a vast land empire from Mexico and other countries. But these scholars, many of whom were heavily influenced by currents of Pan-African thought, engaged in their own nation-building project: To assert a collective African-American identity by recovering and reconstructing the African past, subverting representations degrading blackness and debunking the claims of figures from Kant to Toynbee that blacks were a people without history.
Comparative, transnational and diasporic history can take different forms. There are works, such as those of Gomez or John Thornton, that examine how belief systems, aesthetics, religious practices, foodways, and much more were adapted or modified to New World circumstances. There are examinations of the African American role in anti-imperialist and decolonialist struggles.
There are also comparative studies such as Eric Foner’s comparative analysis of the transition from slavery to new systems of racial classification, segregation, and debt peonage, and Sidney Mintz and Sven Beckert’s studies of the role of sugar and slave-grown cotton in the development of modern capitalism. . . Then, too, there are studies of changes in racial identities, such as Nell Painter’s The history of the white peopleand Isabel Wilkerson’s use of the concept of caste to understand the American system of racial inequality.
As Kelley is quick to say, “thinking about the history of black people in transnational or diasporic terms does not automatically make one an opponent of American nationalism or even a history-centric approach.” For example, in his study of 19th Black nationalists of the century, Non-African Americansthe researcher of Nigerian origin Tunde Adelek shows that 19th century shows that figures such as Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell and Harry McNeal Turner strongly supported civilizing mission the West’s civilizing mission to uplift Africa and, as a result, helped lay the foundations for European colonization of Africa.
This approach to black history provides a powerful way to internationalize US history. Not only does it provide a powerful antidote to the celebratory claims of American exceptionalism and myths of national innocence and the clear march of progress and justice. By exposing the ugly underbelly of this society’s history, bringing to light the extraordinary agency and influence of an exploited, marginalized people, a much fuller vision of US history emerges, one that reconnects the States the United States and the world.
A former colleague, Gerald Horne, has played a leading role in shaping the globalized, comparative future of African American history and in bringing new perspectives to topics not previously seen through the prism of race. An extremely prolific scholar, Horne, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, has written a series of books with remarkable chronological, geographic, and thematic range. With his transnational and comparative approach, he can be seen as the successor of CLR James.
Educated at Princeton, Berkeley, and Columbia, Horne has published scholarly books on everything from the American, Haitian, and Texas revolutions to the Associated Negro Press, aviation, boxing, Hollywood, the American left, jazz, labor, settler colonialism, and the mainstream. the role of American ships in the illegal transatlantic slave trade.
His books on American diplomatic history include studies of US involvement in Egypt and Ethiopia in the late 1900sth and the beginning of the 20thth century, in the post-Civil War South Seas, and in Kenya, Southeast Asia, Zimbabwe in the mid and late 20th century. He has also published biographies of John Howard Lawson, William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Shirley Graham DuBois, WEB Dubois.
Particularly striking are his books that foreground the role of African Americans in topics where black perspectives have been largely ignored by the historical record, for example, the use of black bodies during the early 1920s.th The turn-of-the-century Mexican Revolution, black responses to the Cold War, and African-American attitudes toward the rise of the Japanese empire before World War II.
Of course, Horne is not alone in writing about black resistance to slavery during the Revolutionary era or the violent confrontations between the police and the Watts mansion in 1965. But his work underscores a troubling fact: that by failing to recognize the importance of race and slavery in American cultural, diplomatic, economic, and political history and in the formation of the modern world system, mainstream historians have not only obscured African American agency, black perspectives, and the influence of black culture on all that we think of as American, but also distorted . and damaging public understanding of the country’s fundamental power dynamics.
James M. Banner Jr., who taught at Princeton for many years before founding the National History Center, the History News Service, and the National Humanities Alliance, recently declared that “all history is revisionist history.” . History is certainly an argumentative discipline. Historians not only write conflicting accounts and interpretations of past events and decisions, but vigorously debate the purposes and uses of historical inquiry, the dynamics of social transformation, and the possibility and desirability of historical objectivity.
Just as consensus is the toxic enemy of creativity and innovation, it is also the enemy of knowledge and historical progress.
History, a discipline that for many years defined itself narrowly as the study of politics, statecraft, and war from the perspective of leaders, has certainly expanded its range of topics, methods, and evidence base. But until remarkably recent times, history was an unfortunately exclusionary discipline that drew a sharp divide between those whose accounts mattered and those whose writings did not.
If you want to understand why different perspectives matter, look no further than our standard curriculum. American history looks fundamentally different when we shift our perspective and view the past through the lenses of African American, Asian, Latino, LGBTQ+, and women’s and disability studies.
Or take another example provided by the astute commenter who writes below the name of bushy Unemployed Northeast. Look at the canon of the Great Books between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the 16th century, between Aurelius and Plutarch and Erasmus, Machiavelli, Montagne, Rabelais. What books are usually assigned? Certainly Dante and Chaucer and perhaps Anselm and Acquinas.
But look at what is left out: “The Golden Age of India, the Golden Age of the Islamic World, the Golden Age of the Maya, the flowering of fiction in China and Japan…. Shahnameh, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Swamp, Conference of the Birds, Vis and Ramini (clear inspiration for Tristan and Isolde), Popol Vuh, The Tale of Genji, The Tale of Heike, various retellings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata- s – these are all monumental contributions to literature made by non-Europeans during the ‘Dark Ages…’.” These were just a few reading suggestions off the top of the Northeastern Unemployed.
It is disconcerting to discover that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”
Art is long, life is short. Understanding takes time and, alas, life is too short. Acquiring wisdom is a collective task that requires the inclusion of previously ignored perspectives and hitherto unheard voices.
Steven Mintz is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
